“Qua – At the beginning of time” (2009).

Synopsis:

“At the beginning of time, our world was a desert illuminated by two suns where the mankind barely could keep alive and the night was unknown. Meanwhile one sun provided life, the other one provided a sure death. Then, the change started…”.

Personal Comments:

This shortfilm project started as a personal challenge after finishing “Return to the Dream”. The main goal was to improve my ability to tell a story with images, developing a silent plot that only with main action, carefully camera placement and film cut, the story got alive. Secondarily, I tried to improve my abilities animating and postprocessing, although I reached mainly the second objective; a big amount of the good visual success are founded on an almost neurotic searching of new postprocessing techniques; more than an a half of the shoots were redesigned until 5 times in render and postprocessing steps, which involved more than half a year spent on visual look improvement and establishsing a visual standar for the rest of the work to be done.

Plot material is based on a chinese legend called “QUA”, that I found looking for inspirational ideas at Internet. Briefly, tells how in our ancient past, the Moon was very hot and shiny, more than the Sun, impeding normal life course. One day, a man called Qua climbed a hill and thrown a handful of sand to the star, extinguishing its fire. The wounded moon runned far away in the space, so far that its light was harmful no more, but its surface would be marked forever with scars and wounds after the sand touch, as we know today. Plot basis was so visually powerful that I only needed creating a couple of characters and motivations in order to get an alive story and start working.

Always improving. The best and the worst:

The best: visual appeal; the story is simple but quite understable.

The worst: character animation and design should have got more development.